Today, time and water are in short supply. While recent years have seen considerable attention focused on water conservation, one of the more inefficient uses of water in the home is still the personal shower. A great majority of all personal showers employ only a single head, allowing only one person to shower at a time. In addition, such showers generally do not employ features which address newly established water conservation codes. As a result, considerable water is needlessly wasted during the showering process. Various efforts to reduce water use in personal showers have been made, such as the use of low flow volume heads and flow interrupting shut-off valves. Such devices still permit only a single person to shower comfortably at a given time. While a number of dual or multi-head shower configurations have been designed, they are generally designed to provide a plurality of differently directed sprays for a single person and are ill suited for use by two persons showering concurrently. Those configurations designed for use by more than one person at a given time have heretofore proved largely unsuccessful primarily due to their limited versatility and attachment means.
Examples of multiple head shower devices are seen in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,822,826, 3,913,839, 3,121,235, and 3,971,074. The first two patents each teach an attachment assembly for use by two people concurrently wherein two shower heads are mounted on a horizontal conduit extending between the walls of a shower/bath tub enclosure. Such devices do not provide any vertical adjustment for persons of different heights, presents an obstruction to the user's heads, are generally unsightly and, cannot be used in a shower stall where there is no wall opposite the water supply pipe to which the device is secured. In addition, such devices do not employ water-saving features.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,971,074 and 3,121,235 employ a multiple number of shower heads for providing a plurality of differently angled sprays for a single person. They will not comfortably accommodate more than one person at a time and thus provide little or no water savings. U.S. Pat. No. 3,121,235 provides several shower heads extending from a vertically mounted pipe communicating with the shower's water supply pipe. While the individual shower heads are mounted at different heights along the vertical pipe, they do not have the flexibility necessary for convenient use by two people concurrently. The upper most head, while extending outwardly from the vertical pipe, is below the water supply pipe in the wall and thus does not provide the necessary spray angle to reach a second person within the shower enclosure. In addition, such a device intrudes both into the shower area and into the bath tub rendering a permanent installation of such a device very undesirable. U.S. Pat. No. 3,971,074 provides a number of shower heads, all of which are designed to converge on a single person. Like the device of the preceding patent, this arrangement is also very intrusive into the shower area and is generally unsightly. The dual shower head configuration of the present invention overcomes these deficiencies and provides a space efficient, water-saving configuration highly suitable for concurrent use by two people and, if desired, two adjustable sprays for use by a single person.